Review of Unstoppable (2010) by Dawdlingpoet — 25 Nov 2021

Somewhat ironically for me, I felt this movie started too quickly with little character development and the action was too far and few between - the plot concept is about as basic as it comes, so don't expect too much from this. There are some seemingly perilous scenes involving arial shots of someone being winched onto the train, which is rather nail biting and it does 'hot up' from there, about half an hour or so in but I felt the movie suffers because it doesn't really show much about the locations the train is headed towards - a map/diagram highlighting the main towns in its path is shown but I thought that to humanise the populations in these areas would have helped add alot more tension, rather than talking about rough projected injury/impact figures.

Its rather cheesy at points with scenes involving children and a teacher in another train talking about what they've learnt about rail safety(!) and at other points with an emotional phonecall to a loved one, you get the idea. There's the fearless men willing to do whatever it takes to stop the train and the feisty young woman communicating with the men in the train who oversees the operation (her name is Connie, she's played competently enough by Rosario Dawson - ill mention more about the cast later on) and is rooting for them the whole time, she who 'won't take no you-know-what'.

The first half of this movie I wasn't much impressed with but I did feel more engrossed once it, pardon the pun, gathered speed, so to speak.

There's plenty of adrenaline by the time the stories really taken off, it just felt a little inconsequential somehow... this is more of a mans movie I guess, in a way but eh, it just didn't quite 'hit the mark' for me - it started off rather slowly and it ended up a bit too cheesy and predictable, I guess - there are elements such as one of the men trying to stop the train having received a letter saying he was to be forced into early retirement with no benefits etc. Having said that, I'd imagine some people will quite enjoy watching the action scenes, there are some suitably tense moments and so I'd rate it overall as being satisfactory, as its rather average, not particularly good but not awful, as in without merits at all.

With this movie, the story is just about what you get - a train on the loose with a mad rush to try and stop it but thats it - I do feel like perhaps it could have been elaborated a bit to better effect somehow - highlighting more of the communities involved or something, though there were big crowds shown and alot of cable news footage is shown later on in the movie to keep us up to date on the trains location and so on. However, there are some pretty good action scenes and it does look quite realistic and it becomes even somewhat nail biting on occasion - I watch movie on a fairly small screen under 25" but I'd imagine this would look more impressive on a large screen, especially in HD, so it does have that going for it - its pretty fast paced and pretty watchable mid way through, if you don't mind the cheese and so on.

There's the usual muzack to try and create an air of tension during some scenes but nothing amazing. The performances were decent enough - I almost feel sorry for Ethan Suplee who plays Dewey, the unfortunate driver who accidentally lost control of the train, he's probably better known as starring in the US sitcom 'My Name is Earl' as a rather unintelligent friend of Earl - his characters aren't the most bright, it seems!. Cast wise there's also Denzel Washington, who's well known for his roles in action/drama movies such as Fallen and Deja Vu - he gives another decent, fairly solid performance in this movie but the script doesn't entirely allow him to shine entirely, I think, still there's nothing to complain about as such. The ending was alright and overall it was average - there's one or two things going for it and one or two against it and thats about it, I think.

No, I wouldn't specifically recommend this movie. This isn't a very poor movie as such but its far from excellent, its thoroughly average really. The cast is decent and there are some close to nail biting scenes but its nothing particularly special and its a bit too cheesy for my taste, I reckon, so I'm not going to recommend this one, although it could still be entertaining if you want to sit back and watch a basic action movie and the story sounds like something you'd be interested in - I'd say give it a go if you noticed its going to be shown on TV or something like that, otherwise don't go out of your way to see it but that's just my opinion.